MSS - Software for planning research aircraft missions

Scientific aircraft research flights have to be planned beforehand. For that it is necessary to have model forecasts of relevant quantities such as meteorological parameters, chemical composition or particle information to guide the aircraft to the location of interest. Typically, many scientific instruments on board those aircrafts used to investigate e.g. the chemical composition of the air in order to get new insights often with the involvement of different science groups.

For discussion of the possibilites of the research flights, the Mission Support System (MSS) was developed. This software helps to review a big amount of metereological and model data by viewing the forecasted parameters of interest along possible regions of a proposed flight path. Data and possible flight paths can be displayed on a hoizontal view (map projection) or on a vertical view (along the proposed flight path). Flight paths can be constructed and modified on these views. Exchange through a waypoint table is also possible.

The talk gives a brief insight into the MSS software development current state.

We are using the OWS interface standard. https://geopython.github.io/OWSLib/ MSS is a client/server application. The QT client interacts with a paste wsgi server. The software is available for all platforms on conda-forge.